People write me letters and say I should answer them. But I don't like to answer letters. I don't write letters. I've never written my mother one.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't write for any particular kind of person.
I do not pretend to write much of a letter. You know under what circumstances I am writing.
I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.
People write to me all the time, and I write back.
I won't let people write anything they want to about me.
From a very young age my mother persuaded me that I could write for fun, but I had to have a proper job - very good advice.
It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
Sending a handwritten letter is becoming such an anomaly. It's disappearing. My mom is the only one who still writes me letters. And there's something visceral about opening a letter - I see her on the page. I see her in her handwriting.
I write a letter to my mother every day, because in that letter, I write down my day. And if I don't write it down, then tomorrow I will forget it and it's gone.
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.